work. life. open source. diatribes.

One of the more challenging things in leading a project at Eclipse is dealing with the IP policy. However, this isn’t a bad thing though, a clean code base can ensure more adoption, especially from commercial adopters. A big part of this process is to come up with ip logs that represent the contributions to your project. This helps establish a code pedigree for your project, plus, it allows you to also easily recognize contributors if you wish. In the past, this was mostly a manual process that involved bugzilla queries and CSV files.

Well, thanks to the Eclipse Foundation and the committer representatives, we no longer have to do that. Check out this bug. The basic gist of things is that you tag your patches with the ‘iplog’ flag when you want to include a contribution in the iplog:

Cool huh? Now that we have a standard way of doing this, tools can be written to automatically generate the log and check for compliance. In my opinion, this should make the lives of project leads much easier so we have more time to focus on the technology instead of counting the amount of lines in a patch 🙂